Civilising Missions and the Rise of International Hierarchies in Early Modern Asia

When IR scholars examine ‘standards of civilisation’, they typically privilege the Western civilisational standard that structured international society during the colonial era. Conversely, this article compares the ‘civilising missions’ of non-Western empires in the early modern period in Mughal India and Qing China. As foreign conquerors ruling huge and diverse empires, Mughals and Manchus faced common problems legitimating their dominance over indigenous majorities that vastly outnumbered them. In both cases, they formulated elaborate civilising missions to justify their rule, recruit collaborators and sustain the hierarchical international orders that formed around their empires. In foregrounding these parallels, this article helps us to better understand how hierarchies form in international politics, while also illuminating the specific role civilising missions and processes played in constituting international hierarchies in non-Western settings.